The Syrian regime is fighting for its survival.  I have no sympathy for it, and will welcome its consumption in a revolutionary overthrow.  The struggle in Syria is fundamentally - not exclusively, and not in a crude, unmediated fashion - a class struggle.  It is an open war of movement between, for the most part, the most advanced sections of the popular classes and a narrow state capitalist oligopoly which has always dealt with the surplus of political opposition by jailing it or killing it.  In that struggle, inasmuch as it matters what I think, I situate myself on the side of the popular opposition.  Not in an undifferentiated manner, and not without confronting the political problems (of eg sectarianism, pro-imperialism etc) that will tend to recur amid sections of the opposition to any of these regimes.  But without conditions or prevarication.  

Yet imperialism has its own reasons, of which reason knows a little, for seeking a different kind of ending to the regime: one which does not empower the currently mobilised masses.  And I really think the chances of an armed 'intervention' in Syria under the rubric of the UN have noticeably increased.  And how we orient ourselves to that situation politically is, I suspect, going to be an important problem in the coming months.  The following pleonastic stream of head-scratching and arm-waving is my contribution to securing that orientation.

***

For what it's worth, this is how I read the international situation with respect to Syria at present.  The revolutionary wave that was unleashed over one year ago has reverberated through every major social formation in the Middle East.  Because it broke the Mubarak regime, which was a regional lynchpin of a chain of pro-US dictatorships, its effects could not be localised.  The response of the US was one of confusion and fright, followed by the bolstering of some of the ancient regimes and simultaneously a very cautious 'tilt' toward some mildly reformist forces (in general the most right-wing and pro-capitalist forces).  The Saudi intervention in Bahrain was an instance of the former.  The invasion of Libya was an improvised policy along the latter lines.  And the position within Yemen has been somewhere between these two, with the US attempting to manage a replacement of the leadership without empowering the actual popular forces calling for its downfall, some of whom were conveniently vaporised by US bombing raids.  

In general, I think the liberal imperialists have won the ideological argument that the US must be seen to be on the side of reform, because today's insurgent forces are potentially tomorrow's regimes, and the US will have to deal with them on oil, Israel, and so on.  However, the political argument as to what concretely to do about it is much more in the balance.  The realpolitikers have dominant positions in the Pentagon, while the lib imps seem to have a strong voice in the State Department.  It's schematic, but nonetheless a reasonable approximation of the truth to say that the former are very cautious about any Middle East wars, especially wars fought on a liberal (rather than securitarian) basis, while the latter are much more bellicose.  Obama's 'state of the union' address, which undoubtedly had its share of theatrical sabre-rattling, made it clear that he would see the overthrow of the Syrian regime as a logical corollary to the overthrow of Qadhafi, which he boasted was made possible by ending the occupation of Iraq.  Moreover, his administration has continued to ratchet up pressure on Iran, through sanctions, and we are beginning to hear serious arguments in the bourgeois media in favour of a war.  I am not saying that an attack on Iran is likely in the short or medium term.  But any escalation regarding Syria could not but be linked to the escalation against Iran.

Obama and Clinton are also highly responsive to pressure from the European Union and particularly France.  Sarkozy is naturally leading the EU's response to the Middle East crisis.  He may not have a triple A credit rating, but he does have nuclear weapons, a large army with extensive imperialist experience, and a permanent seat on the UN Security Council.  (Merkel, who has none of these, is taking a much more passive role.)  And since the Sarkozy administration has been embarrassed and damaged by the extent of its relations with dictatorships in the Middle East, its 'tilt' toward potentially pro-EU reformist forces has been all the more pronounced.  Britain, consistent with its imperial past in the Middle East, its adjusted but continuing role as a subordinate partner of the US, and the warmed over 'liberal interventionism' embraced by Cameron and Hague, has tended to align with France over both Libya and Syria.

***

Another important actor is the Arab League, and within it the prominent figure of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC).  In the latest Socialist Register, Adam Hanieh points out the strategic centrality of the GCC to the region as far as imperialism is concerned, due to its pivotal role in the region's capitalist development, its hold of enormous oil resources (a quarter of future production), and its articulation with the world economy.  Three GCC states have experienced their own uprisings - Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Oman - all of which have been repressed with military force and marginalised in the ideological apparatuses.  Even so, it is the GCC monarchies which have been most stable in the context of the global recession, and the most active in managing the fall-out.  So, while the Arab League has not adopted a single, coherent policy response to the regional uprisings, GCC states have played a key role in manouevering the League to support selective interventions, monitoring missions, sanctions and so on against regionally awkward regimes.  The League's support for the intervention in Libya was a decisive factor in enabling it to come about.  Saudi Arabia, which has coordinated many policy initiatives to contain the region-wide uprisings, has involved itself deeply in the Syrian context.  The involvement of Arab League monitors, received with some scepticism by the Syrian local co-ordination committees, was driven by Saudi Arabia; their recent withdrawal has also been triggered by Saudi Arabia.  The subsequent lobbying for a UN resolution calling for the Assad regime to step down and supporting some form of UN intervention, has been led by Britain and France, but strongly supported by the Arab League.  Russia is at present the only obstacle to the resolution, due to its long-standing relationship with Assad.  

Finally, there is the Syrian opposition.  The pro-imperialist bloc, the Syrian National Council (SNC), largely led by exiles based in France and Turkey, has not thus far been representative of the sentiment among the rank and file of Syrian opposition members.  There is a left and nationalist contingent to the revolt, moreover, that complicates any attempt to simply annexe the revolt to the wider regional strategies of imperialism.  Further, even in Libya, where no left or labour movement existed prior to the overthrow of Qadhafi, and where the revolt was quickly disfigured by a racist component, the opening of the political space subsequent to that overthrow has created a window in which germinal popular forces have been able to assert themselves.  A political strike in the oil industry took out a pro-Qadhafi chairman, while unrest in Benghazi has resulted in a serious rift with the governing 'transitional council'.  The ongoing struggles in Egypt, which is strategically central to the whole region, can also swiftly make calculations made on an ad hoc basis, moot.  Nonetheless, complications and problems in a line of development do not necessarily mean that the line will be impeded.  Were the Syrian opposition sufficiently crushed, I think it would be more likely that a pro-intervention 'line' could gain ground, and this would tend to divide the left-nationalist contingent.  This has to be the assumption because, as Bassam Hassad has pointed out in his critique of the SNC and various pro-Assad types, the existing support for imperialist intervention is itself already the result of brutalisation, mediated by certain types of politics, (generally both liberal and Islamist).  

There is also the problem of sectarianism.  As far as I can tell, the majority reject any explicit political appeal along sectarian lines.  The banners saying 'no to sectarianism' reflect a popular sentiment.  The local co-ordination committees have explicitly opposed sectarianism in the movement.  Every substantial report I have encountered indicates the strength of the determination to overcome sectarian politics.  Nonetheless, the regime has a sectarian basis and has reinforced sectarian divisions as a technique of statecraft - not fundamentally dissimilar to a protection racket.  Even though many of the Christians and Alawites supposedly protected by the regime are among the protesters, it would be astonishing if some sections of the opposition were not themselves driven by sectarian politics.  It is noticeable that commentators dismissing the revolt as mere sectarian intrigue tend to focus on the role of the salafists.  They exist as a subordinate stratum in the revolt, and they are among a number of forces which are against the regime on sectarian grounds.  Far from constituting the main political current in the uprising, they nevertheless represent a problem and a weakness for the opposition.  Such divisions are, moreover, always manipulated and amplified whenever imperialism is involved - Iraq, anyone?  

Finally, there are divisions over the use of armed force against the regime.  The Free Syrian Army (FSA) is a large army of defectors from the regime's armed forces, perhaps including tens of thousands of soldiers - at least 15,000 on recent estimates.  This exists, to put it crudely, because the Israeli occupation exists.  These soldiers, trained to defend Syria from Israeli aggression, are now defending Syrians from state aggression.  But their remit has expanded.  While their initial rationale was to defend communities against the security forces, they have consistently engaged in military attacks on the regime's infrastructure.  The risk of doing so, of course, is that it brings down the regime's repressive apparatus.  There is gossip and speculation to the effect that the FSA represents an imperialist conspiracy.  I see little proof of this.  Despite representing a layer of military defectors, it looks to have gained real support among the oppressed and exploited.  The problem is that most of the movement's organised core has insisted on keeping it peaceful, on tactical grounds: the terrain of violent struggle is not where the regime is weakest.  Yet, in some parts of the country, particularly the poorest, the regime is not leaving that option open.  So, tactical divisions underpinned by geographical disparities and the regime's tactics of selectively striking out at opposition strongholds, are also a potential weakness.  Now since the FSA is loyal to the Syrian National Council, which supports an imperialist intervention, there's an obvious dynamic that could come into play here.  That is that in the event of the popular movement being crushed or at least severely set back, the armed component comes to the fore and substitutes for the masses; and in the event of a UN-sanctioned intervention, the FSA becomes an auxiliary of NATO, and alongside the SNC forms the nucleus of a post-Assad regime that is not representative of Syrians. 

There is not an immediate move to bomb or invade Syria.  There is, however, mounting external pressure to create the conditions that would allow this to happen fairly quickly and expediently.  It would be a mistake to assume that because such a path would be riddled with problems, it would not be pursued.

***

With all that said, I intend to elaborate further in an abstract manner before coming up for air.  From a marxist perspective, the most fundamental antagonism in the capitalist world system is class antagonism.  These, of course, cut through the dominated regimes in the imperialist hierarchy just as much as they do in the dominant regimes.  As such, in a popular struggle against these regimes, marxists start from the position of supporting those struggles.  To be more specific, in various direct and indirect ways, these antagonisms are amplified by imperialism, inasmuch as the ruling classes of the imperialist chain benefit from the exploitation of workers and popular classes in the dominated societies.  This is a fundamental cleavage which, arising from the outward extension of capitalist productive relations from the core, separates the dominant from the dominated formations. As a consequence, marxists also start from an axiomatic position of opposing imperialism.  It is not simply that imperialism retards the social development of these societies, but that it constitutes an additional axis of exploitation and oppression.

Within the class and state structures of such societies, moreover, the domination of imperialism is reproduced in various ways, such that the modes of domination within those states cannot be extricated from the question of imperialism.  As a consequence, popular movements arising against them will tend to have two targets: a domestic and international opponent.  Their struggles will also have a tendency to be internationalized, and to have global effects.  By the same token, where you have a national bourgeoisie that has developed in resistance to imperialism, that resistance will also be inscribed in its forms of class rule and in the state through which its political domination is secured.  Its legitimacy will depend in part on the national bourgeoisie's promise to organise the society in its self-defence.  It follows that where there is a break-up of the regime's social control, the issue of imperialism will be to the fore in its ideological and political strategies for retaining its dominant position.  This isn't merely manipulation, nor can it be wished away.  It poses a particular challenge to popular movements aiming to depose the regime, which is why the role of the anti-imperialist pole in the Syrian uprising is so critical.

But the reality is that these dying regimes can't effectively resist imperialism.  The republics organised under the rubric of Arab nationalism have rarely, even in the rudest health, fared much better against Israeli aggression than the old monarchies, and have often been available for opportunistic or long-term alliances with imperialism.  This is even true of partially resistant regimes.  Hafez al-Assad's support for Falangists against the Palestinians provided the occasion for Syria's initial invasion of Lebanon.  Assad senior was also a participant in the Gulf War alliance against Iraq.  His son, Bashar al-Assad, has always notched up plaudits from Washington as a neoliberal reformer - the liberalisation of the economy along lines prescribed by the IMF has been one of the causes of the polarisation of Syrian society, and the narrowing of the regime's social base - and leased some of his jails to Washington during the 'war on terror' to facilitate the torture of suspects.  The Islamic Republic has a similarly chequered record with regard to imperialism.  So, if the regime's raison d'etre is partially that it is an anti-imperialist bulwark, the obvious answer is that it isn't even very good at this.

So how do we orient to this situation, politically?  It seems obvious enough that the greatest bulwark against imperialist intervention in societies like Syria is the fullest and most active mobilisation of the masses themselves.  Their defeat at the hands of their regime would represent a green light to those pressing for intervention.  This is not the main reason why I think marxists should support these rebellions, but it is a very strong reason for doing so.  Second, the organised opposition are for the most part, the most politically advanced sections of the popular classes in both Syria and Iran.  They are the ones who, however they represent it, are responding to the class antagonism in a way that we would want the most radical workers in Europe, the United States and beyond to do.  For this reason, arguments along the lines that both regimes continue to have a popular base and shouldn't be written off are fundamentally wrong.  They do have a popular base, but it is not predominantly organised around any claims or values that the left, especially the revolutionary left, has a stake in.  So, one must hope for that base to erode, and rapidly.  Third, the same basic political grounds on which one opposes an undemocratic capitalist regime and supports its downfall are those on which one must oppose the regime of US imperialism, and work toward its downfall.  Anti-imperialism is an indispensable and not merely occasional aspect of emancipatory politics.  

These problems cannot, of course, be resolved with such abstract formulae: but such formulae have a role in reminding us of our political coordinates.  In concrete struggles, socialists in the imperialist societies would be trying to maintain relations with the opposition to these regimes, linking with exile groups and supporting their protests.  But at the same time, they would be the first to oppose military intervention, and would try to assemble the broadest coalition of forces to stop it.  Even if the deep political logic of events suggests that there is a confluence of these positions, in the real time in which such practices are developed it means negotiating some potentially fraught alliances.  Serious disagreements over the issue of imperialism are bound to emerge in any solidarity campaign; just as there will be sharp disagreements over the regime in any anti-imperialist campaign.  Socialists would have to manage these tensions carefully, while being the ones to consistently argue that the two goals are mutually necessary, rather than opposed.

Obama has given in to the most reactionary elements in US politics.  He has opted for deep cuts in public spending which will certainly include reductions in Medicare and Social Security (thus bad for Obama's base), and are certainly dysfunctional for US capitalism.  There's no sense of a long-term strategy for reviving growth or sustainable profitability here.  It has delivered for narrow sectors of US capital, specifically finance capital, but seemingly no one else.  And yet, it's still not enough.  

Standard & Poor's, the credit rating agency, has downgraded the US, which means that the cost of government borrowing will go up, and the ability to repay any deficit will be reduced.  It will also hurt consumer spending, as every American will have to pay more to borrow.  And, as we've already seen in Ireland, Greece and Spain, the attempt to pay it off by cutting spending only further weakens economies that depend significantly on such investment, thus reducing the revenues needed to pay any deficit.  It can only contribute to pressures toward a 'double dip', as the Eurozone crisis brings us back to 2007/8.  Corporate investment is weak, job growth is terrible, wage growth ditto, and consumer spending is fragile because households are still up to their ears in debt.  It would take very little to tip the economy back into crisis.  What's more, Wall Street traders appear to be perfectly well aware of this weakness, as they have been panic selling stocks since the debt deal was reached.  S&P's rationale is as follows: 

This is a raw exertion of class power.  Making it more difficult to repay debts while demanding that the government repay its debts faster is only a reasonable step if you accept that finance capital can do whatever the bloody hell it likes.  During the New York City fiscal crisis in the 1970s, created because lenders refused to roll over debts, a director at thew NY State Emergency Financial Control Board pithily explained: "The demands of the lender become reasonable because the lender is the lender."  A poignant reminder that behind every rationality lies a sociology.  Of course the hedge funds, ratings agencies, banks etc are less than concerned about the effect of underfunded infrastructures such as health and higher education.  As far as they're concerned, spending is too high and they don't much care how it comes down.  Theirs is a very narrow perspective.  But why doesn't the Wall Street establishment seem overly concerned that 'fiscal consolidation' of this kind will compound the fragility of the US economy and possibly tip the world into a new recession-cum-depression?

The pathologies of the US economy are not exactly a secret.  Michael Perelman identifies the following as weaknesses of US capitalism in its neoliberal phase: long-term underinvestment in research and development, low productivity resulting from a shift toward low wage service jobs, more financial vs productive investment, underinvestment in infrastructure, and an irrational military Keynesianism that results in the best innovation and research being conducted in secrecy, hoarded by the Pentagon etc..  Obama has performed sterling work on behalf of the Wall Street establishment, throwing his immense clout behind the bail outs, screening them from criticism, allowing them to continue to act with relatively little serious oversight, bringing them into government decision-making, and basically devising most of his policies with an eye to pleasing investment banks, bond traders and, at the outside, hedge funds.  But what he doesn't done is re-orient US capitalism in a more rational direction.  What he doesn't done is anything that could conceivably rescue the system from its pathologies.  This raises the question of why the wider US ruling class isn't kicking up a stink about it?

David McNally has made a strong case for arguing that US capital, or at least dominant sectors of US capital, find more and more of their investments and sales overseas.  Sluggish growth and profitability within the core capitalist economies has thus been more than offset by dynamism in south-east Asia.  As a result of imperialism, then, much of American capital is at liberty to make significant returns without worrying too much about what happens to infrastructures, consumer power or labour productivity in the US.  And with financialization, much of the US services and manufacturing economy generates revenues from financial investments rather than productive investment.  The centrality of imperialism here may explain why reducing military spending to cover the deficit isn't on the agenda.  It would also explain why the mandarins of Pennsylvania Avenue have appeared to be desperate to placate the ire of Republican tubthumpers, blasting away with biblical fury about the dangers of out-of-control spending.

So, we have an astonishing spectacle.  The political leadership of the dominant capitalist states is now trying to shred the public investment that has hitherto acted as a lifeline to their economies.  They are talking about savagely reducing labour costs, ostensibly to compete with China or India.  And they're being urged on by the banks and business federations despite their awareness of the tremendous peril involved.  This is actually going to undercut the conditions that led to their dominance in the first place.  It's as if they've given up on the idea of having a relatively stable economy with a productive, educated, healthy workforce, and have decided instead to jack up the absolute rate of exploitation, take as much as possible until the economy crashes again, and then raise the flood barriers, hoard their capital, let others take the pain, and allow governments to police the inevitable fall out.  

My assumption was that the austerity project was mainly opportunistic, that it condensed policies long desired by capital, and that it was pushed rapidly in order to preempt the Left and keep the initiative in the hands of the ruling class.  As a result, I anticipated that they would have enough flexibility to backtrack on or delay any measure that looked like seriously endangering their long-term profitability.  They could always return to the 'Keynesian' emergency management of 2008.  Perhaps that is still the best assessment.  But in these circumstances, ruling class opinion is likely to be fractured and highly unstable.  And it's not impossible that as the economy continues in its parlous state, as the ruling ideologies lose their plausibility and traction, and as states lose the ability to coordinate workable policy responses, the weight of opinion will form behind the slash-and-burn option.

The war on Libya has not gone well.  Kim Sengupta's report yesterday detailed this starkly:

With Islamophobia as their current national mobilising tool, the billionaire-funded 'Tea Party' movement has scored a victory, though potentially a pyrrhic victory, in Delaware primaries. The candidate is a genuine loony-tune - the masturbation is a sin, guns are holy sort, my opponents are hiding in my bushes sort of loony-tune.

As Gary Younge reports, the Republican establishment did not want her as the candidate, because the Democrats can beat her. You can see the line coming: Republicans have been taken over by extremists, this is not what America is about. I don't think this is an electoral threat for the time being. I expect that the Democrats will probably win Delaware, and anywhere else that the Tea Partiers claim the Republican nomination. The Democratic base that has been demoralised and insulted by the Obama camp for the last couple of years will probably turn out if there is any chance of some of these racist lunatics taking power.

But it does show how a capitalism in crisis, without a rational alternative clearly available, backed by substantial social forces rooted in the working class, unleashes and amplifies all of the most reactionary and socially regressive elements in society. As Gary Younge puts it, people can't eat hope. With unemployment at historic highs, investment low, banks refusing to lend, foreclosures proceeding apace, the insecurity of the middle classes - for I think you'd find the Tea Partiers are largely middle class white Americans - is becoming poisonous.

A year after the ecstatic spectacle of Obama's nomination, and more than a year after the Republicans were overthrown in some surprising new places, the Democrats have lost the previously safe senatorial seat of Massachusetts, lately the fiefdom of the late Ted Kennedy. This spells the end of Obama's 'healthcare reform' in its current, pathetic, version. Nancy Pelosi has made this clear: "I just don't see the votes," she has said. Her Democratic confederates largely agree. It looks as if, predictably, the massive public consensus in favour of healthcare reform, has once more been squandered. This was the Republicans' hope when it became clear that candidate Scott Brown was leading the polls. He told his suburban voting base that if they wanted to scupper this socialistic abomination, he would be the vital 41st vote for Republican filibusters.

The 'debate', if I may speak loosely, over healthcare reform was one that acted as a lightning rod for right-wing hysteria about high government spending and taxes. Relatively rich GOP voters identified their class interests in terms of lower taxes, a smaller state, and less handouts for the lazy bums. (Didn't those irresponsible, impoverished, often black folks cause this crisis through their subprime borrowing? Isn't it time to reintroduce red-lining and free up the police to deal with the inevitable crime spree among this hapless bunch, rather than lining their pockets with other people's hard-earned cash?) Scott Brown knew this, and evidently recognised that the best way to package some dog-whistling over the issue would be to give it an impeccably liberal imprimatur. His campaign crafted the successful 'JFK ad', which segued JFK spelling out his Keynesian tax cuts programme from 1962 into Scott Brown explaining that lower taxes would equal more jobs - he even delivered a concise account of the 'multiplier effect', though I suspect this was a coded appeal to 'trickle down' economics. The great majority of polls taken after the ad was aired put Brown ahead. Notably, Brown won in some of the areas with highest unemployment. One thirty-second slot would by no means have been enough to do the job. What really mattered was the disillusionment of Democratic voters. The turnout, though reasonable for a 'special' election, was way down on 2008, and fell most dramatically in the most Democratic areas:

In President Obama’s strongest areas — towns where he received more than 60 percent of the vote — the number of voters was about 30 percent below 2008 levels. In the rest of the state, the number of voters was down just 25 percent. In Boston — one of the strongest areas for Democrats — the number voting fell 35 percent.

The Democratic base, in other words, was just not mobilised. Lance Selfa, author of a critical history of the Democrats, asks why this was. It is easy to blame the lousy performance of Croakley, or whatever her name was. Her campaign treated the race as a coronation, at a time when voters are angry. But if right-wing voters are exercised by 'socialism', liberal voters had little to be excited about. In November 2008, they voted for a healthcare programme with a public option, lower insurance premiums, and universal coverage. What they were offered was a system that provided government enforced subsidies to the insurance and healthcare companies, lacked a public option, compelled people who might not be able to afford it to buy insurance policies, and didn't offer universal coverage. The healthcare industry, which had co-drafted the legislation, saw its stocks soar on Wall Street as soon as the legislation was finalised.

The unpopularity of Obama's proposals cannot be reduced to right-wing hysteria, which is only persuasive for about a fifth of Americans and two-thirds of Republicans. Such shrill nonsense motivates a right-wing base and, for that reason, cannot be dismissed - but let's get some perspective here. For a start, Americans hate the current healthcare system. The majority in poll after poll favours something like a single-payer or national insurance health system. That isn't reflected in every poll, of course, but the overwhelming trend is for Americans to prefer a government-run health system to the private, heavily subsidised, system. Secondly, this is Massachusetts we're talking about here. This is a state where a powerful majority voted 'yes' on a ballot initiative favouring a single payer system in 2008. The vote against the Democrats in their heartland was not a vote against socialised medicine, because that is not what was on offer. And despite the slavishly positive spin put on the proposed legislation by Democratic congresspersons, even many of the pro-Obama progressives hated it, and were deeply disillusioned by it. Even Arianna Huffington, bless her Coca-Cola advertising slots, has declared the end of hope.

The current polling status of congressional Democrats is pitiful, hovering at about the same level of popularity as the Bush administration in its lowest ebb. Obama's popularity has also sank, if not to the same lows. This rapid dissipation, after only 12 months, reflects a class anger. As Selfa points out, the president who won on the basis of a claim to represent Main Street rather than Wall Street (ho ho!) is widely understood to represent his major backers:

A September 2009 Economic Policy Institute poll asked a national sample of registered voters to say who they thought had "been helped a lot or some" from the policies the administration enacted. The result: 13 percent said the "average working person," 64 percent identified "large banks," and 54 percent said "Wall Street investment companies."

Obama knows this perfectly well, which is why he was blustering some while back about not running for office to serve a bunch of fat cat Wall Street bankers, and may also explain some of his tentative moves to lightly tax and regulate the parasites. Indeed, in the wake of the loss of Massachusetts, Obama has talked up his reforms yesterday, promising a 'fight' with Wall Street firms who tried to sink his proposals. These are not radical reforms - if the multi-millionaire Tory shadow chancellor George Osborne approves of them, they aren't that radical. But the president's combative language at least suggests that he is aware of where his weakness lies. This electoral pressure is important, though it is nothing compared to a mass movement. And I would contrast the miserable healthcare reforms with the surprisingly good proposals for immigrant rights reform, which comes on the back of pressure from a well-organised campaign rooted in labour and the migrants themselves, despite the latter's difficulties with organising under the ICE jackboot. This tells us that the Democrats are susceptible, if only at some remove and with considerable reluctance, to pressure from the left. In that light, the best thing that could happen to the electoral coalition that swept Obama to power is that they stop hoping, and start fighting.

Until the so-called underpants bomber failed to strike, you would have been hard pressed to find much information on the Yemen insurgency outside of Press TV. Of the Anglophone media, only the wire services seemed to pay much attention to the Houthi rebellion, and Saudi air strikes against it. US involvement in the Saudi air strikes, some of them ostensibly against 'Al Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula', started to be reported this month. Now this clueless bampot/false flag (take your pick) and his combustible loin cloth have been taken into custody (I'll let you riff on how it could have been a 'dirty bomb'), the former reported as saying that he was trained by 'Al Qaida' in Yemen. So, Obama has his opportunity to come out openly and demand more US attacks in Yemen.

What is this actually about? In one light, the conflict could be seen as a proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran, the latter accused (though I have seen no evidence for the accusation) of sponsoring the Houthi rebels, who are in turn accused of having engaged in a cross-border raid on Saudi Arabia. In another light, it is simply about the breakdown of the Yemen polity, which is increasingly de-funded as oil and tourism revenues tumble. President Ali Abdellah Saleh's resort to reliance on Saudi air power against the Houthi rebels reflects the inability of the nothern ruling class, represented by Saleh, to maintain their dominance in response to various regional challenges despite having won the civil war in 1994. As is so often the case, though, it is not possible to extricate the internal conflict from imperialist pressure, as the US shores up the regime and attacks both Sunni and Shia rebels, the latter through Saudi strikes. One thing it isn't about is 'Al Qaida'. The radical Sunni militias that helped the north to victory in 1994 may have turned against their former allies, and there may be organisations there dedicated to attacking US interests in the Middle East. However, to characterise such groups as 'Al Qaida' is to buy into a brand myth. There is no 'Al Qaida' in the sense of a coherent movement with a shared organisation, a clear set of goals and a consistent ideology.

The roots of the current crisis of the Yemeni state are to be found in its construction from a polity divided between British imperial rule, and Ottoman rule. The Arab nationalist and leftist movements sweeping the Middle East since the 1920s did not take root in Yemen until relatively late, only becoming strong among the Adenis in the south by 1956, though a number of oppositional clubs had been founded. Typically, such nationalist groupings demanded not only the unity of southern Yemen, but also unification with the north: this was the position of the group around the an-Nahda (Renaissance) publication, and that around al-Fajr (Dawn). But the independence movement was given a radicalised edge by proletarianisation and the emergence of a militant trade union movement (the Adeni Trade Union Congress). It was this movement that gave a cutting edge to the emerging forms of anticolonial nationalism, as the organised working class rallied to Nasser's Egypt when it was attacked by Britain, France and Israel in 1956. It had successfully organised election boycotts, scuppered attempts by the British to circumvent anticolonial unity by creating a 'Federation' linking traditional sultan rule in the 'hinterland' of southern Yemen to British capital in Aden, and formed the basis of the People's Socialist Party. Despite ferocious repression by the British authorities, they were able to win major reforms and pose the anti-colonial question in a compelling way.

Meanwhile in the north of Yemen, the lead was taken by Nasirists. In 1962, the newly crowned King, Muhammad al-Badr, had attempted to check opposition by appointing a Zeidi and a nationalist, Abdullah as-Sallal, as head of his bodyguards. But he owed al-Badr no loyalty, and began preparing a coup. A separate group of Nasirists had also developed in the army officers' corp, a typical social base for modernising Arab nationalists. They had been planning their own coup for September 1962, but were beaten to the punch by as-Sallal, whose tanks shelled the palace in Sanaa, the capital of the north, taking control of the city. They declared a Yemen Arab Republic in the north, quashed the Imamate, liquidated the property of some landowners, outlawed slavery, and set up a new currency as well as a series of institutions to help transform the north into an independent centre of capital accumulation. Badr fled to Saudi Araba from where he launched a royalist counterattack, with Prince Hassan returning from New York to rally opposition to the royalists' side. At the same time, a number of local tribal leaders took the opportunity to declare their own Imamates. There began a civil war that consumed approximately 4% of the North Yemen population, with Egypt and the USSR backing the Republicans, and the US and Saudi Arabia backing the royalists. But the royalists had the greater resources at their disposal, and as territories held by the YAR fell, Egypt's involvement in the war became very unpopular domestically, as well as among some tribal forces constituting themselves as a 'third force' hostile to both the royalists and Egyptian involvement. Nasir decided to cut a bargain with the Saudis, pledging to withdraw his troops if the Saudis would stop aiding the royalists. There were also said to be unpublished agreements that would limit the scope of anti-British resistance in southern Yemen. When as-Sallal flew to Cairo to protest against a deal which they were not party to, they locked him up and imposed a new leadership on the YAR. This particular deal collapsed, but the fact that Egypt continued to prosecute the war in the old ways - attempting to control the republicans bureaucratically, containing their efforts in ways congruent with the interests of the Egyptian state - weakened the YAR's chances, strengthening the 'third forces' who would eventually cut a deal with the royalists and turn North Yemen into a Saudi sattelite.

In southern Yemen, it was the left that took the lead. The anti-colonial insurgency had been given a shot in the arm by the declaration of the YAR, although it would probably have received little support from the north were it not for Britain's decision to back the royalists. The socialist Left had until that time relied on more or less peaceful metods of mass mobilisation, but it now became apparent that a military solution was called for. It had to spread well beyond the capital into the 'hinterland', and embrace forces beyond the left. So, a new National Liberation Front was formed, comprising army officers, pro-republican tribal leaders, workers and intellectuals. It sought to mobilised the hinterland and develop a 'popular revolutionary army', quite distinct from the kind of professionalised army that was in power in Egypt and intervening in north Yemen. The guerilla war it launched sought to tax the British army by drawing it into a territory, hammering it, then vacating as troop concentrations became overwhelming, whereupon a new offensive would begin elsewhere. The policy of igniting the mountainous and rural areas of the 'hinterland' was effective. The British had relied on traditional sultan rule to counterbalance the militancy of workers in Aden and the Gulf. Now they had lost control of the countryside, and the insurgency was about to go urban. Attempts by the incoming Labour government in 1964 to coopt the leadership, appointing a nationalist (albeit a right-wing one) as Prime Minister and putting on a conciliatory face, were futile. They were committed to maintaining the 'Federation' and their base, but the NLF was not willing to accept this as the basis for any agreement. British military repression, and the torture of local residents intended to extract information, were insufficient to quell the rebellion.

In 1966, the Labour government accepted that it could no longer hold the base and included withdrawal from Aden in a Defence White Paper. This did not mean that they would relent on trying to ensure a pro-British government remained in power. And, in fact, when Egypt was defeated in the Six Day War in June 1967, they took this as the cue to reverse course, declare that they would increase aid for the 'Federation' government, and maintain their military presence for at least six months after 'independence'. Meanwhile, the NLF was radicalising, having refused to subordinate itself to Egyptian interests by uniting with the more right-wing bourgeois nationalist group, the Front for the Liberation of South Yemen (FLOSY). Its leadership began to speak of 'Marxism-Leninism', had studied the guerilla tactics of Mao and the Viet Cong, and was preparing for a much more radical struggle for power. Instead of depending on the Egyptians for funding, they would expropriate the bourgeoisie (bank and jewellery shop robberies), and raise whatever contributions they could from supporters. The FLOSY, backed by the Egyptians, began to attack the NLF using their new paramilitary units, to little avail. A right-wing faction within the NLF favoured negotiating with the FLOSY, but this was unacceptable to most NLF militants. And even as Britain was back-tracking on its commitment to withdrawal, an uprising in Crater took place in which the police and army corps rebelled against the British. This threatened Britain's last credible instrument of power, the South Arabian army. The NLF governed Crater for thirteen days, freeing prisoners, distributing propaganda, and handing over British owned villas to the local population. Moreover, the British had failed to anticipate one effect of Egypt's defeat in the Six Day War, which was to discredit the Nasirists and hand the initiative to the most radical currents in the NLF. The British had to flee, and by 29 November 1967 their troops had vacated. At midnight, the People's Republic of South Yemen was created.

The NLF left wanted to take the struggle much futher. They wanted a new kind of state, in which the army was a popular militia, and in which political power rested on popular committees in each locality, which in turn would elect officials to higher bodies. Abdullah Fatah Ismail, writing for the NLF left, maintained that the new state could either be dominated by the petty bourgeoisie and become a capitalist state using socialist phrases, or it could be a state of workers, poor peasants and partisans. Eventually, the NLF left mobilised to defeat the relatively right-wing leadership in June 1969, and the country was renamed the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen.

Thus, the north and south of Yemen were divided along political and geopolitical lines. They embodied, appaarently, competing social systems, the former pro-capitalist and pro-Western, the latter aspiring toward socialism and pro-USSR. But that division notwithstanding, the majority favoured Yemen unity, and such unity was nominally sought by both northern and southern states. However, that usually took the form of one side trying to impose its version of unity on the other. Thus, in 1972, the north invaded the south with Saudi support. Then, in 1979, the south invaded the north. No dice either way. The southern state was never to achieve any of its radical aims - it was a poor state, its leadership fractious, its politics expressed increasingly in the dogmatic canards of 'Marxism-Leninism'. In 1990, after the collapse of the USSR, it agreed to unity with the north's military leader, Field Marshall Ali Abdullah al-Saleh, who it agreed would by head of the new state.

But, again, the northern elite ought unity on its own terms. The south's oil riches were there to be exploited only by the northern bourgeoisie. So in 1994, when the south looked like seceding, al-Saleh embarked on a preemptive civil war against the former rulers of the south, the Yemeni Socialist Party, purging them and pillaging Aden at the end of a ruthless seventy day assault. Al-Saleh, himself a member of the Zeidi Shi'a sect, did not hesitate to use right-wing Sunni Islamists such as the 'Aden-Abyan Islamic Army' in order to win that war. (It was they who were later supposed to have organised the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000, and it is groups like this who are often referred to as 'Al Qaida'. It was supposedly a group like this that trained that numpty who didn't quite blow up an airplane in Detroit). Even following that victory, however, the northern ruling class could not prevent the emergence of regional, tribal and confessional challenges, often taking the form of armed insurgency.

This brings us to the present impasse. The model of Yemen unity that has been imposed since 1994 clearly isn't sustainable, nor does it have the remotest resemblance to the democratic and egalitarian promise of the 1960s. And where the old left and nationalist currents have failed, Islamist currents - often right-wing ones - sometimes took their place. And these in turn intersect with regional disaffection, as the geography of capital accumulation favours a central ruling class, while leaving substantial territories impoverished. That is what has happened in Yemen. The current stale regime, having encouraged Islamist currents in order to purge the left, now finds itself on the receiving end of their fire. Certainly, Sunni Islamists have some support in Yemen, and their numbers may be augmented by support from some refugees from the Somalian civil war, and US aggression there. However, while their ability to act speaks to the weakeness of the regime, they do not pose a serious threat to the state, and nor are they the targets of the Saudi bombings. That would be the Houthi rebellion, which is led by the Shabab al Moumineen group, whose members are Zeidi, and which calls for a Shi'a state in Yemen. They are also hostile to US and Israeli domination, and especially to the state's over-dependence on Saudi Arabia. Far from representing a localised insurgency centred on a single family, as the Yemeni authorities prefer to maintain, they do pose a comprehensive challenge to the authority of the state.

At the same time, a secessionist movement in the south has resumed, as southerners claim - with some justice - that they are subject to severe discrimination by the current rulers. The fact that they have been butchered while holding peaceful protests (eg) has tended to deepen their conviction. The Southern Movement is not an armed insurgency but, with a state in fiscal crisis and with unemployment at 40%, its success would certainly deprive the northern rulers of revenue (notably oil revenue) that they intend to keep. They are not Islamists, but nor are they exactly leftists, though they do have support from exiled leaders of the Yemen Socialist Party. Now, the US is committing $70m to upholding the present Yemen regime, and while its back-up artillery might take out some groupuscule leader deemed 'Al Qaida'. the basic aim of its funding and military intervention is to defend the incumbent regime against far more cohesive opponents. The result will be to encourage the regime to continue to brutalise and slaughter its opponents - indeed, help them to do so - rather than attempting any reforms that might be necessary to integrate them. The US doesn't care, of course. Suffice to say they don't have an alternative to the present model of Yemen unity, any more than al-Saleh does. They want to conserve a pro-American regime in Yemen as a de facto Saudi sattelite, and can't be expected to worry about the petty grievances of these little people with their absurd ideas about self-government and autonomy.